Be careful what you don't wish for . . .

I’ll never forget the time I met a friend at Fanelli’s Café in SoHo and, in the course of spontaneous conversation, I brought up the Bible and my beliefs as a Christian.

I had the urge to go to the bathroom and by the time I returned from the woman’s room after being gone no more than five minutes, I found my friend had vanished! She just took off!

I was shocked, looking around the room for what seemed like a half hour, thinking surely she would return, but she never did. I didn’t speak to her again for over a year and it was only the death of a mutual friend that brought about our brief reunion. I knew better than to even mention God.

*****

What kills me is how many Christians too—even  some of my closest family members--avoid hearing what I have to say about God’s Word and what He's really doing in our world today.

I believe part of their mentality (on top of thinking, “Agh, what does she know about anything anyway?!”) is:

“If I’m not confronted or corrected regarding my relationship with God, and how my belief system may actually contradict His Word and be erroneous, I don’t have to change anything about how I’m living.”

The worst part is they think that excuses them from being held accountable by God for what they do not know. It’s the old ‘ignorance is bliss’ subtext.

Of course, this doesn’t work at all because God knows our every thought and motive. By running away (literally) from the possibility of hearing truth, the conscience is further seared and it only makes it harder to come to your senses. There’s no fooling God. He sees that you have little or no interest in learning who He really is and your relationship with Him is negatively affected.

Ultimately, an unsaved person receives a worse punishment from God for being someone who rejected (or avoided) an opportunity to hear His Word than those who can honestly say they’ve never had anyone (including the TV and radio) try and present salvation truth to them.

I always remember how my pastor says when he was a door-to-door evangelist in his home state of Alabama, back in the ‘70s, he would have people tell him, “I’m just not ready, preacher.” He would respond, “Well, when are you gonna BE ready?!”

Waiting to get on-board with what God’s really doing and your part in it is waiting for disaster. Like the great Chicago preacher J.C. O’Hair used to say, “Light rejected becomes lightning.”

Jordan explains, “When you share God’s word with people, if they reject it, it hardens their heart. Sears their conscience. There’s a spiritual transaction down in their inner man that is the result of their refusal to believe God’s word.”

Here is a great passage on this from an old study of his:

“The Word of God will do its work when you believe it. But it’s also powerful. It’s energetic. It’s got dynamism to it. It’s got live, creative energy. That’s why Paul says, ‘It’s sharper than any two-edged sword.’

“The world Paul lived in they had a bunch of different kind of swords. They had a sword that was a big old monstrous thing that only had one edge to it and they carried it on their shoulder because they didn’t want it to cut themselves.

“God’s Word is not like that. It’s not only effective sometime. I mean, maybe you could beat a guy over the head with the blunt side of that sword, but you couldn’t cut his head off very well.

“In the Roman world they had a sword; I call it the ‘Bat Masterson sword.’ You ever see a guy have a sword stuck in a walking cane and it’s hidden away? Well, they had a sword like that. But God’s Word is not that way. You can hide it in your heart and so forth, but it’s not a word that is to be hidden away so you don’t use it or nobody knows about it.

“They had a sword that was an innate kind of a sword. One that was used to show your rank like a general would wear. A General Patton kind of a sword that you walked around and showed off with but don’t use it. Well, the Bible’s not a showpiece that’s of no practical use.

“They had another sword; it was a small one that just had a sharp tip on it to thrust. You couldn’t cut; you just stick with it. But the Bible’s not a point here and a point there and point there.

“This sword (Paul’s referring to) was little so it was easy to use, but it had two edges to it. Either way you wanted to cut, it cut. It was called the ‘slaughter knife,’ actually, and it’s the sword the Roman Empire used to conquer the world with because those two edges were where it would cut either way.

“God’s Word works either way as long as you use it. If it’s only got one edge, it’s only effective some time, but this two-edged sword, here’s what Paul says:

“II Cor. 2:15 says, ‘For we are unto God a sweet savour of Christ, in them that are saved, and in them that perish.’

“When you preach God’s Word to others, it either cuts life or it cuts death. People believe it and it gives life. They reject it and Proverbs 13:13 says, ‘Whoso despiseth the word shall be destroyed: but he that feareth the commandment shall be rewarded.’

“That same gospel that a man would reject and have it blind him, that same message when someone believes it, gives life. So it’s a two-edged sword. Life for those who believe and death to those who don’t. ‘Death to death, life to life.

“Hebrews 4:12 says, ‘For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.’

“You would never know there’s a difference between your soul and your spirit in your inner man if it wasn’t for God’s Word. We all know that we have an outer man and an inner man.

“The older you get the  more you realize you have an inner man because your inner man and your outer man don’t get along as well as they used to. Your inner man says, ‘Okay, let’s go!’

*****

“What passes for psychology, they’re talking about being able to study your soul, but they don’t know what your soul is; they can’t distinguish it between your spirit and your soul. They have no way of studying it. They might can see some things it does, but they have no answers. It takes God’s Word to do that.

“So God’s Word is sharp; it has this cutting capacity to distinguish; to split hairs but not just hairs—invisibly fine hairs between the soul and the spirit. And work in your soul and spirit the things that need to be worked there.

“When he says ‘joints and marrow,’ the marrow is the part of the body that produces the blood; the life that’s in the flesh. The Word of God is the source of spiritual and physical resurrection. That’s the point of the passage.

“He says flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. Jesus says to His disciples in Luke 24, ‘Come touch me, I have flesh and bones.’ Well, if you have flesh and bone but you don’t have blood, the marrow is where the blood in your body is created.

“What that’s a reference to is physical resurrection, but it’s also a reference to the spiritual working of God in your inner man and God’s word can do that and it’s a discerner of the thoughts and intents of your heart. That’s the part of that verse that’s kind of scary, isn’t it?

“When you read God’s Word, it reads you. It’s a critic that can evaluate and discern, not just what you think . . . you know, I say to you that ‘God hears everything you think,’ but He doesn’t  just hear what you’re thinking; He knows WHY you’re thinking it, usually before you do.

“Your heart is so deceitful and desperately wicked that it can fool you. Like Paul says, ‘But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.’

“Your heart can deceive YOU into thinking that your motive is one thing and it’s really another. It’s God’s Word that can tell you what it really is. That’s why you can’t trust your emotions. You can’t trust your viewpoint; all you can trust is God’s Word.

 

“The verse in Hebrews 4 starts out, ‘Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight.’ Notice it’s ‘his sight.’ You see how He gives personality to the Word of God? That’s because the Word and God are one.

"The verse ends, ‘but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do.’

“God is omnipotent, so the Word of God is powerful. God is omniscient. He’s everywhere. God is omnipresent, so there’s nothing that isn’t open to Him and all that He is is attributed to His Word.

“That’s why that Book is so important and that’s why Jesus says, ‘The words that I speak unto you they are spirit and they are life.’ It’s not the external things. It wasn’t with Israel and it won’t be with you.

“It’s His Word and where life is, where the enabling power of God’s life to go down into your inner man and transform you from the inside out, resides in that Book. Where the working of the Spirit of God is is in His Word.

“A guy wrote a book some time ago called, ‘Satan is alive and well on Planet Earth.’ Well, can I tell you God the Holy Spirit is alive and well on Planet Earth and ready to work, quickly and powerfully when you believe it.”